Over the last decade, important contributions to our understanding of schizophrenia have come from two different types of studies.

Neuroimaging studies have found that certain parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus and amygdala, are smaller in people with schizophrenia – a devastating psychiatric illness with high heritability. At the same time, large genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which analyzed gene sequences from thousands of people, have found evidence suggesting that schizophrenia arises from the combined effects of many genes and not from a defect in any single gene.

Combining these two approaches was a logical next step. A new study led by Patrick F. Sullivan, MD, FRANZCP, a researcher and professor at both the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, evaluated the relationship between common genetic variants implicated in schizophrenia and those associated with subcortical brain volumes.

The study, which was a large-scale, global collaboration involving nearly 600 researchers from more than 350 institutions, was published online ahead of print by the journal Nature Neuroscience on Monday, February 1, 2016.

“In our study, we integrated results from common variant studies of schizophrenia and volumes of several brain structures,” Sullivan said. “We did not find evidence of genetic overlap between schizophrenia risk and subcortical volume measures, either at the level of common variant genetic architecture or for single genetic markers.

At UNC, Sullivan is Yeargan Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Psychiatry and Director of Psychiatric Genomics. At Karolinska Institutet he is Professor of Psychiatric Genetics in the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He is also the founder and the lead principal investigator of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the largest consortium in the history of psychiatry.

This research was supported by several funding bodies and medical companies, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the European Union’s Seventh Frame Programme, the Welcome Trust, UK, and the Swedish Research Council (full list in the article). Researchers from institutions in the following countries contributed to the study: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, UK, USA.